In a previous poston this blog, Vish Mulchand and Patrick Osborne made an astute observation about the Big Data challenge: It’s systemic to most enterprises and it’s not limited to data. It’s really “Big everything.” They mentionConverged Infrastructurenot just as a solution strategy but also as an enterprise-wide IT strategy. They advise customers to start small and manage capacity smartly as their businesses evolve—a very successful strategy indeed, employed by some of the fastest growing companies like Farmville creator, Zynga.

At the heart of HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy is the idea that you desire choice in how you build, deploy and maintain IT systems. This choice is offered by providing a large menu of solutions that come in various shapes and sizes, built on open systems to allow you to mix and match with components from other vendors. You also require solutions that play nice with your existing infrastructure investments so you don’t have to spend time and money on acquiring new development and administration skills.

Consider Converged Systems

TakeConverged Systemsfor instance. HP offers a choice of virtualization solutions and data management and business intelligence solutions, plus cloud provisioning and management solutions. All are available on a variety of operating systems and hardware that can scale seamlessly with zero downtime. In addition, each Converged System is available as an appliance, built-to-order system or hosted solution.

It’s primarily thanks to our “converged” vision that most customers now see HP as a trusted advisor rather than just an IT vendor. HP works with you to build the best possible solution for your particular challenge rather than trying to sell you a hammer and spend all our energies convincing you that each of your challenges is a nail.

The Big Data FUD factor

There is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about Big Data. Not a day goes by without a new statistic on how much data enterprises will have to deal with at some point in the near future. It’s not uncommon to find vendors opportunistically using that FUD to coerce customers into over-provisioning their IT systems.

HP has a very different stance on Big Data than the other vendors who claim to understand the problem. While most vendors address “Big”, HP addresses “Data.” That is to say, other vendors push larger storage and compute systems to keep up with data growth. That is not only a dog-chasing-its-tail situation for you, but also self-serving on the part of IT vendors who are guaranteed a revenue stream as your exhaust your IT resources every few years.

HP’s approach to Big Data

HP instead tackles Big Data with 21st century tools that are built from the ground up to handle the volume, velocity and variety of data being produced by humans and machines.

TakeVerticafor instance. The creators of Vertica started with a clean slate as they built a solution designed to rapidly find insights across petabytes of data from disparate sources while allowing customers to load new data into the analysis stream without latency or downtime.

On the other hand, with its latest Exadataannouncement,Oracle has clearly signaled to its customers that bolting on additional storage is the core of its Big Data strategy—at the risk of creating unbalanced, inefficient and vulnerable IT systems.

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll offer some perspective on how our planet collectively created the Big Data mess, why it’s the best thing that has happened to businesses worldwide and how CIOs can avoid losing sleep over data growth and compliance. Stay tuned.